Marketing fantasies from the Boom Times of Wind. Who were they kidding? | Siemens Gamesa
By Jo Nova
It’s dire. After suffering a 36% fall in June due to unexpectedly bad maintenance bills, Siemens Energy has lost another 37% on Thursday as it revealed orders and revenue would be even lower than the current subdued expectations. The share that sold for 24 euro in May is now selling for 7.
Things are so bad Olaf Scholz, Chancellor of Germany has even said Siemens Energy is “very important”. Apparently talks are “intensive”, which presumably means the company is on death’s door and the German government is being asked to help save it.
And so we arrive at a point where a company selling products that depend on government subsidies is now asking to be subsidized itself. And the whole green industry depended on government pumped “science” and artificially low interest rates to exist in the first place. Like a pyramid scheme skiing on a two ponzi scams, sooner or later it has to collapse.
Tyler Durden, ZeroHedge
Siemens Energy Shares Crash 37% As Renewable Bust Sparks ‘Green Panic’
Siemens Energy shares in Germany crashed on Thursday after the company warned its wind turbine business is grappling with quality issues and offshore ramp-up challenges. The company said it’s evaluating various measures to strengthen its balance sheet and is discussing state guarantees with the German government. This comes as a financial crisis in offshore wind energy is brewing.
The word is Siemens Energy is asking for up to 15 billion euros in guarantees.
UPDATE: Siemens Energy is a spin off from the larger separate giant Siemens which has a market cap of 100b Euro and 300,000 employees. The smaller energy division has 90,000 employees and a market cap of only 7b Euro now, but it was 30b a few years ago. Siemens still owns 25% of the spin off energy division.
The whole wind industry is down
Even the Guardian is asking if something is is wrong in the whole wind industry, albeit only as means of paving the way to ask for bigger subsidies.
The windmill business has not recovered from the Siemen’s June shock that bigger turbines was not always better, and ominously something was wrong which would cost an obscene amount to fix. It didn’t bode well that the problem was narrowed down to either the rotor, the bearings “or the design”– which covered pretty much everything. By August Siemens Energy announced a jaw dropping annual loss of €4.5 billion.
Confidence is gone. In July the Swedish energy giant Vattenfall stopped work on the offshore wind farm plans off Norfolk. In August the Danish wind firm Ørsted lost 25% after it revealed it may have to write off ” the value of its US portfolio by nearly £2bn.” The share market was so skittish it wiped off nearly £7bn in value that week. Overall the Ørsted share price has dropped by two-thirds from its peak in early 2021.
The latest headlines on Orsted, say it all:
Orsted: Sunrise Wind Project Likely to Be Ditched After Failure to Get Extra Subsidies; Shares Cheap
A week ago Deutsche Bank “slashed its 12-month share price forecast for Danish energy giant Ørsted by 36%, citing supplier delays, lower tax credits and rising rates.” — CNBC
Things haven’t exactly been good for Vestas either:
Vestas is also down 30% this year.
This is the rotor of the newest, largest offshore Siemens SG 14MW . Look how big these machines are.
It will theoretically end up propped up on a stalk 140 meters high over the ocean waves, or something like that. The blades are 115m long. Imagine fixing it.
h/t StJohnofGrafton
No problem Jo. Bowen will bail out the wind money scheme by entering higher prices for contracts.
This will likely to be all wind as none will built near Australia due to the rising cost, the difficulties with construction (including getting the necessary ship types for installation out to Australia via the Suez or Panama canals) and the every increasing likelihood of Labor being dumped at the next Federal election (and State Labor in Qld & Victoria).
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Let’s hope that the asleep at the wheel, premier of Tasmania can see the flickering light and cancel the monstrous eagle killer planned for the top western corner of his State.
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Note sure there is any business case for Robbbins Island to go ahead with the current caveat that they cannot operate for 5 months of the year – surely they would have to appeal that first. In any case, as I believe Tassie cannot afford it, they would have to rely on massive funds injection by the Federal Govt, and there’s no sign of that happening.
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Here’s why we drift along with these crazy projects:
https://youtu.be/08v5C5DvR14?si=3hVRU8rtAlua2z5k
Just the first FIVE MINUTES of this near two hour video will give you the direction of travel.
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“The answer, my friend,
Is blowin’ in the wind;
The answer is blowin’ in the wind.”
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Ray Hadley, shock jock on 2GB Sydney, has the Robertson Brothers compose promo songs for his show. The latest is “Bowen in the Wind” which takes a satirical look at the idiot in charge of destroying our electricity grid.
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To be fair to the Minister , I don’t think he wanted that portfolio. He’s an Economics degree type. I dare say he has trouble driving even a screw-driver. Before long the average Aussie will have forgotten his name or what he did.
One of the “benefits” of rising high is that a you have further to fall than the “little people”.
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There is soon to be a new Cinema Film release. The Film is to be called “Gone With The Wind”. And Woke Disney is not making it.
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There is also the saying ‘pissing in the wind’.
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The reality that these machines are not free and they don’t renew themselves is finally being revealed to the stock market and as usual the money ultimately decides.
Politicians and lobby groups are still doing their best to hide “inconvenient facts” but now that the emperors clothes are being exposed maybe the not so bright Energy Minister Chris Bowen will wake up to the fact that his off shore wind project is a pig.
Snowy 2 is no better, Turnbulls Folly – which he should be made to pay for – should be scrapped. It was a stupid idea all along.
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Bowen will never ‘wake up’, if ‘wake up’ means he has to declare his economy-destroying errors.
His ego is monstrous; his insight minimal. He’s Australia’s Nero. Burke, Albo and Chalmers are no better, but imo their problem is not having the mental capacity and general knowledge to do their jobs. Ideology blinds them all. They simply jump onto international caravans that they wish to appease, UN and China in particular. Even the mentally challenged Biden called out Albo in the USA but Albo isn’t bright enough to recognise the polite chiding from our main/only defence ally. He simply showed his determination to go to China, regardless.
Our leaders live in a time warp, so complete that they don’t see current realities. The COL problems are a bit of a joke to the grinning Chalmers. Fossil fuels they believe a threat in a hundred years but they can’t see the worse disaster they sow today, nor the dangerous wars in immediate play. They have endless cash for climate-related renewables; none for Defence!
The electorate can’t throw them for at least another year. The greatest hope for the nation would be to have someone like Shorten, a realist if not simply another extreme leftist, organise to toss the ridiculous leadership entirely. Even the feckless Marles would be up for that. He has called our Defence necessities and current dangers, only to see Albo et al ignore the dangers the nation faces. Albo simply talks the talk; thinks he is fooling everyone! That was the point of Biden’s remark! Decapitation would create enough turmoil to keep Labor so busy at holding itself together. Some current reality might be recognised. We might resume an appearance of professional governance with an attempt to at last redress the worst conditions we have faced (with the worst governance in history) since before WW2. It would require the centre right of both Labor and Coalition to come together in an emergency cabinet and lock out their leftwings and teals to get anywhere.
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Agree DOC
Covid showed how appalling the govts are here in Australia. My brother, who has lived for decades in the UK, watched from afar, aghast as the AU govt repeated all the mistakes made by the UK and other govts. No learning, no attempt to learn – instead they stayed in the time warp of March 2020 for years. Even now we have the poisonous and deadly vaxxes STILL being shoved into arms when any idiot who can read would know that they promote covid, promote hospitalisation and kill those who take it in shocking numbers, with hundreds a week of excess deaths which started as soon as these horrific treatments were pushed.
Albo, who I met several times at Uni, and still remains the most arrogant person I have ever met, will just take the sinking ship down. He has to be removed by his colleagues.
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‘boom,
I’m interested to know more about Mr Albanese and his under-lying strengths and weaknesses.
20
I’m sure those 100s of thousands of high paying jobs in wind and solar will arrive any decade now …
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The high paying jobs have been in existence for a while now planning, scheming, influencing, lobbying, scamming and channeling kickbacks.
The good and bad news is that the wind caravan is moving on into another money making scheme.
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Hydrogen is the next frontier in subsidy farming
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Hydrogen can only get in on the “renewables” gravy train if wind and solar are practical and economic.
So No ! H2 is a non starter .
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Siemens has LONG form as a major corporate-state player.
They were “big” in Germany in the 1930′-40s.One of their projects was developing and manufacturing the electronics needed for the development of the German nuclear reactors, (plural) and their “low-yield” bombs, again “plural”. Then there were the “guidance” / control electronics for the various rocket and radio / radar projects.
As Hugo Boss was to German “fashion”, so Siemens was to electrical and electronic advancement, but on a massive scale.
Has the company “gone Woke” or just deepened its corporate state links, or both?
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Siemens was so big originally that there was effectively a suburb in Berlin that was all Siemens.
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“And so we arrive at a point where a company selling products that depend on government subsidies is now asking to be subsidized itself. ”
It’s starting to look like the beginning of the end.
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We hope so Ronin. Eventually the market will decide and eventually the market will decide here as well. When the transmission companies realise the costs involved in networking the nation and the opposition to it I feel many will say it is all too hard. Bowen’s offshore fantasies are also causing the impacted locals to resist and to do so they start using the arguments that Aboriginal groups have been using to shut down gas in the North West. Interfering with whale songs is enough to kill gas and interfering with whale migration should be enough to kill offshore wind. Come on Tanya Plibersek you know we are right.
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“It’s starting to look like the beginning of the end.”
Yay!
And the poor sods (us), that paid in beginning, and the middle …
will pay in the end.
And the same folk that went to bank in the beginning, will go to the bank in the end.
These rules should be taught in school.
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I notice siemens on many products, especialy in hospitals and in particular special Xrays.. Make sure the baby is safe if you throw out the bathwater.
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I would hope that Siemens have a corporate structure that separates its real work from its renewable fantasy work so if/when Siemens Energy collapses, its productive businesses will continue to operate or be sold off to pay its renewable creditors.n
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Just to clarify William, I’ve added this note to the post in reply to your point.
UPDATE: Siemens Energy is a spin off from the larger separate giant Siemens which has a market cap of 100b Euro and 300,000 employees. The smaller energy division has 90,000 employees and a market cap of only 7b Euro now, but it was 30b a few years ago. Siemens still owns 25% of the spin off energy division.
So Siemens the mother corp is suffering but not in danger of being taken down. I think it’s shares were down 5%.
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You would almost think they saw this coming…. Not unlike the generating companies who have set their unreliables up as separate corporates so they can go bust on their own.
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The demise of manufacturing in the western world has been evident for all of the 21st century as China has taken over. If Siemens is to survive, they will need to shift more of their manufacturing to China. They already have production of smaller turbines in China.
Wind turbines and their support systems to deliver on-demand power are a coal sink. They do not save coal. So if you are not burning coal, you cannot make wind turbine power generating systems.
All that changes is that manufacturing just shifts to places that do not have artificial constraints on burning coal.
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Let’s see all the useful idiots dig deep and invest their own money in Siemens. They’ve told us without wind power we’ll have a climate Armageddon. This is life and death you know.
If Siemens stock has fallen 75% it means even the big woke investors of other people’s money are bailing. All those virtue signalling people who tick the ‘socially aware’ box for their superannuation investments will be next.
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I think we’ll see a lot of big wind farm projects canceled, now that money isn’t cheap anymore.
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Latest information from China is they are building an 18 MW wind turbine with a blade diameter of 310 metres. This is insanity. The fundamental problem is you cannot design these turbines to handle the forces on the blades, especially vertical down forces.
Once a turbine gets erected there is never a process whereby the blades are checked for balance which could not be done unless you take them down. There will always be some type of debris flying through the air in strong winds and it doesn’t take much damage to alter the balance and start to affect the bearings in the gearbox. The violent change of wind in thunderstorms puts enormous stress on the blades and towers and although designers think that feathering the blades by mechanical means avoids this it doesn’t.
Even with the blades in a feathered position, horizontal to what they perceive to be the airflow, in frontal thunderstorms the wind veers suddenly 180 degrees with the passage of the storm and an even worse force occurs under a thunderstorm cell because of the extreme downbursts that can occur. They simply are not aware of what happens in this type of weather. With 54 years flying aircraft from 1965 to 2019 I have had some knowledge of propellers and the forces on them.
To place wind turbines up on exposed ridges and face the forces of fronts and thunderstorms is an ideal place to encounter strong winds, hail and lightning and the insurance industry is now becoming very aware of the risk in insuring them. What Siemens and the others are now encountering is the increasing failures of gearboxes and bearings and there is no answer to it.
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If ever you wanted evidence of the power of thunderstorms to destroy things, note what happened to a twin engine Piper Chieftain on the 2nd of December 2005. Near Condoblin in NSW the aircraft owned by a wealthy cattle guy flew across the face of a line of storms at 10,000’and crashed by inadvertently entering an area of intense turbulence.
It was that severe that the right engine and wing was torn from the aircraft at that height and wreckage was scattered over a number of kilometres. I know from reading the accident report and the diversion of airline aircraft in the area at that time that the storms would have been higher than 40,000′
If storms will do that to an aircraft wind turbines and solar panels will not survive either.
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Future of the hydrogen industry:
We’ve got to get into this now or we’ll be left behind.
Huge subsidies to Forrest and others.
We’re going broke. We need huge bailouts or we’ll have to shut down and all the jobs will be lost.
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And Twiggy will take our money up front and out back as well.
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Imagine if a political party went to an election saying we are not going to invest any more of ‘your’ money in ridiculous renewable projects. Instead we are going to invest in proven technology that will enable our manufacturing industries to remain viable.
The “NO” vote is a sure sign that there remains a silent majority who remain rational when given a clear alternative.
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There is zero chance that any of the uniparty, (liberal/labor/green), will be doing that.
Yet most Australians will still insist on voting for one of these parties and then whinge about rising electricity costs and the inevitavle blackouts when, not if, they occur.
This is self inflected madness.
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At the risk of being boring, I repeat my claim that our mandatory exhaustive preferential system in the House of Representatives means the voter cannot exclude an unworthy candidate, and can’t put two or more last.
Last time I made this comment someone replied that it was still considered a valid vote if a shortened set was given in the order 1, 2, 3,…
But I haven’t chased down the validity of that. Does anyone have a reference?
Cheers
Dave B
Cooyal
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David, from the AEC
“To vote for a Member of the House of Representatives, you are required to write the number ‘1’ in the box next to the candidate who is your first choice, and the numbers ‘2’, ‘3’ and so on against all the other candidates until all the boxes have been numbered, in order of your preference.”
In the senate you can vote below the line but must number 12 candidates (in a double dissolution there will be 12 seats available). I always vote below the line and have been successful in my top choices.
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Thanks. Thought that was true for the Commonwealth parliament.
Dave B
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Here’s my comment yesterday and the REAL DATA from the REAL WORLD that proves TOXIC W & S are a WASTE of TRILLIONS of $ for a ZERO return.
Who cares about their NUTTY ZERO lunacy, because we only generate 2.13% GLOBALLY after decades of their BS and FRAUD.
AGAIN here are 2022 OWI Data’s Global PRIMARY ENERGY share by SOURCE.
Fossil Fuels 85.37% .
Traditional biomass 6.91 %.
Wind & Solar 2.13 %.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-primary-energy-share-inc-biomass?time=latest
You can add up Nuclear, Hydro, other renewables etc at the link.
AGAIN, data analyst Willis Eschenbach double checked and came to the same conclusion as Our World in DATA.
Obviously W & S are tiny but very TOXIC disasters and are the source of our energy problems.
And W & S have to be replaced every 15 to 20 years at least and at an Aussie cost of up to 1.5 TRILLION $ by 2030 and 7 to 9 TRILLION $ by 2060. See “Net Zero Australia” I’ve linked to recently.
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BTW I just checked what the various OWI Data energy percentage numbers were when Dr Hansen started this idiocy in 1988.
Fossil fuels were 84.27%
Traditional bio mass 11.37%
Wind & Solar 0.02%.
Think that since 1988 Human co2 emissions are now about 14.5 BILLION tonnes higher per year than 1988 and all of that increase have been emitted by China and the NON OECD developing countries.
So do you think these liars and con merchants will ever wake up?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-primary-energy-share-inc-biomass?time=1988
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“So do you think these liars and con merchants will ever wake up?”
They are WIDE AWAKE as to what they are doing.
It is the mug punters who have to be kept asleep, forever. Not unlike the plot gag behind “The Matrix”.
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I’m going to have to take a Seat, .. this is just too much for me this now. What with all the rubbish in the local news, what we ACTUALLY SEE at the Port of Invergordon and surrounds, it doesn’t all add up. Looks like a local Boss is doing all he can to garner favour with the SNP and this tripe, heading for Nobility, maybe ? When you get all the Mail telling you about who is doing what in the alternative fuels, blah di bla. Oil is UP , gas is down, next day other way around, etc but local supply is still high cost …. and the weather is COLD ( but not so cold as to have much frost or snow yet ) Cold due to everything being soaked after a cool summer – so residual warmth anywhere … Och I dunno, just feeling the effects of a few really short dark dreich days.
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A Bex and a lie down works well too.
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I would suggest a wee malt afore gang tae bed, Jimmy.
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Tilting at windmills Jo? Cervantes had that covered five centuries ago, in Don Quixote.
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More like tilting at reality.
Wind and Solar are taxpayer subsidized fantasy attempts at addressing an impossibly ignorant and corrupt issue.
Cervantes addressed the illusion of a single man, not the illusions of national economies tilting at imaginary solutions to imaginary problems.
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Physics rules. For rotating machinery, power is related to torque and rotational speed:
Power = Torque (N) X Shaft Rotational Speed (rad/s)
The 14MW wind turbine will be rated at around 9rpm (0.94rad/sec). That gives a tip speed of 100m/s (360kph), which is typically close to the design limit. So torque works out at 14.8MN.
A direct coupled steam turbine runs at 3000rpm (314rad/sec) requiring torque of 44.5kN. Still big but a couple of orders of magnitude smaller than the wind turbine.
Fortunately the torque capacity of a shaft is not linear with diameter. So the wind turbine shaft does not need to be 333 times the diameter of the steam turbine. In fact, the relationship is 4th power so just 4 times bigger for the same torque.
More importantly, if the steel shaft used in the 14MW wind turbine could be put into a steam turbine you could make a turbine capable of producing 4700MW. And it would be useful because it would be able to do it continuously.
Siemens have not thought this through. They are wasting a huge amount of valuable resources all chasing a fantasy. Energy underpins human development and coal remains energy king. The coal that went into making the monster SG14 226 and all the stuff needed to bring this unreliable power to an on-demand consumer will not be saved over its operating live. It is a coal sink not a coal saver.
It would probably be educational for Bowen to get inside one of these monsters to appreciate the resources that go into them. Then think about how much coal China needs to burn to make just one of them.
Siemens is looking shaky. Are the wheels falling off? Imagine all their customers supporting these monsters if Siemens fails. China will win because it has no reservations about burning coal.
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While what you say is true, metallurgy also rules. The cantilevered bearing forces on a wind turbine necessitate their early failure due to Brinneling of bearing races if they are not rotated continuously and Fluting failures from stray voltages. See https://www.thesnellgroup.com/featured-tips/brinneling-and-fluting-two-common-bearing-faults
Pushing wind generator capacity without fully addressing bearing loads and failure modes is simply marketing strategy over reliability, and neither address capacity factor.
There is a reason that modern ships don’t use sails.
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A turbine spinning at 3000rpm driven by steam at 500C while powering a hydrogen cooled generator directly coupled also has plenty of engineering issues around its bearing.
The metallurgical issues are just another of the aspects that any equipment design has to consider. My point is that these monsters require a humungous amount of materials and resources to shape them while having guaranteed output of precisely ZERO. And they take more coal to make than they can save over their operating life.
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The DATA proves that they’ve been lying to us for the last 35 years and are happy to WASTE more TRILLIONS of $ down the drain and yet the Bowen loony still tries to continue with this blatant fraud?
Where are the so called scientists or decent pollies or most of the MSM or business groups etc?
I know some have always tried to tell the truth but apparently it doesn’t matter and the weight of numbers still remains with the liars and con merchants.
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Maybe the Minister knows nuffink and relies upon all those “Sir Humphrey” characters in the Civil Service. After he’s moved on we may find the next administration is equally mis-informed.
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Andrew Bridgen, in the UK, is asking similar, basic, sensible, questions about the Medical Intervention and its associated subplots.
The problem is that he knows, roughly, the direction of some of the answers, because of the undergraduate degree he did. He knows his stuff! :).
And he is courageous. 🙂 🙂 🙂
And look what’s happened to him. But he is making a difference.
When Westminster has so few STEM attuned MPs, it’s easy for the ‘Generalist Mob’, where specialisation hampers decision making, in the Civil Service, to ensure their ‘decision making responsibilities’ are carried out to great effect.
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There was never anything rational, scientific or ethical about the foray into Wind Subsidy Harvesters.
Now that reality has struck we should all cheer.
At another level, a prayer might be in order for those in Super Funds that have funneled contributors hard earned into this ugliness.
Would fund “managers” be liable for having failed to assess the placement?
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Green Dreams Going Up In Smoke
The impracticality of this “green” vision has become blindingly obvious, and the “green” movement has begun to fall apart. “GE Offshore Wind to Post $1 Billion in Losses.”
“Blackouts have already begun (not to mention skyrocketing electricity prices), and as blackouts become more widespread, voters are going to punish the politicians who lied to them about “green” energy. Let’s hope that happens before tens of billions more dollars are poured into the coffers of the cynical “green” industries.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/10/green-dreams-going-up-in-smoke.php
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Anyone, anywhere, at any time, under any honest analysis, that supports Wind or Solar as a National Grid strategy, is incompetent, illiterate, innumerate, amoral, and insane.
It is past time to electorally punish those who continue to promote what is factually, mathematically, and economically, nothing less than theft of public monies and deception of the populace.
Not one of those voting for this insane pablum ought be held harmless. They are not ignorant, they are complicit.
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So what is the nuts & bolts difference between an oil rig and a giant plastic fan?
The BPs and BHPs somehow managed to survive for couple of generations somehow.
48
The oil rigs provide a valuable commodity having instantaneous market value to over 6,000 products.
The Plastic Fans provide value to Government Subsidies and ideological goals.
The former is Real. The latter is imaginary.
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Almost ALL of the creation of wind turbines required the use of fossil fuels. The question is whether they produce more energy than is used to create and run them?
Many years ago I read that the break even point for wind turbines was 25 years at average of 50% load, but this limited where they could be positioned. However subsidies [in the UK] were so high that 25% average load was profitable, so siting the turbines became more ‘flexible’, i.e. inefficient. The other cost is connecting the turbines to the grid : building pylons and the infrastructure required.
The major problem was that many turbines were only lasting around 10 years. I think this is where a lot of the financial issues occur.
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Wind turbines and solar panels just shift the coal burning to China.
At around 30% penetration they may save coal through their operating life. But what does not get accounted for is the reduced utilisation of the fossil fired plants and the coal that went into their manufacture. They become under-utilised assets.
At higher levels of penetration you need to throw in things like synchronous condensers, much more power lines and energy storage. Once they are added in, there is little chance of saving any coal.
Snowy 2 and its interconnections is currently heading for $25bn. You need 10 Snowy2s to serve the NEMs average demand so $250bn for storage. You then need something like 120GW of wind/solar to pump the water and serve the demand when generation permits. Current Installed cost around $240bn. So of the order of $490bn. That would buy 2700Mt of coal. Say 60 years of Australia’s current coal consumption. Now Snowy 2 should give 60 years but the wind turbines and solar panels would likely have 2 replacement cycles so add in another $400bn assuming some of the assets involved like building are still usable. So that would buy another 50 years of coal.
You start to realise that WDGs plus storage are a coal sink not a coal saving.
The smartest thing for Australia would be to recind the RET and get Victoria to build a few new power stations to chew up the lignite that does not have much export value yet. Save the anthracite for China so they can keep supplying low cost goodies for Australia.
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It’s worse than that.
The imported wind turbines and solar panels cause immense additional pollution on top of the Chinese unrestricted coal burning involved in their manufacture.
Shipping the coal to China also burns thousands of tonnes of bunker fuels and then thousands more tonnes of bunker fuels are burned on the return voyage carrying the expensive “clean energy” contraptions made in China from our coal and steel.
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I think you meant “coal an iron ore”.
Australia doesn’t make iron or steel anymore.
We send it away for processing because all of our workforce are university educated and cant get their hands dirty.
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Yeah thanks KK.
Sad isn’t it.
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Sad? No it was a good point that you made, Australia has been de-industrialised.
“An” we all should check posts more.
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My father once interviewed 50 top-end engineers for 4 positions in the UK reactor design team. He was a civil engineer with extensive experience but few qualifications. All the potential candidates had nuclear engineering degrees so were technically better qualified than him yet most of them failed elementary practical engineering tests which even I as a teenager had a pretty clear understanding of.
I reckon engineers need an apprenticeship in a trade. In the early ’40s my father had the privilege of working on the workshop-floor under Geoffrey de Havilland and John Bolton, developing the Mosquito bomber. He often referred back to principles he learned as an apprentice and as a Chief RAF Mechanic in WW2. While he was an insidiously correct taskmaster he was probably under-rated as an engineer.
Sadly, it’s similar to-day. There is an old electrical engineer in my street who recently attended 3 interviews for the one position. He commented that the men interviewing him were in their 30s and displayed a lack understanding of the position he was being interviewed for. They requested he come in for a 4th interview but I advised him to refuse on the grounds that if they couldn’t assess him from his long career CV and 3 personal interviews, he was probably wasting his time.
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Ironically, one of the 4 engineers my father selected was given his job and he was offered a lower salary position doing a lesser task.
My father was an ABSOLUTE ZERO BS person and he fought the Government with vengeance until they invented Central Technical Services and made him head of it. As the “too hard basket” office of the UKAEA he did a lot of useful work including designing a nuclear waste disposal system.
How to do revert to good general qualifications ? Is it about Classical Education, Critical Thinking and Scientific Protocols ?
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Hey John – my wife’s grandfather was an aero engineer and designed the tail plane of the Mosquito – He was great guy and a mean player of the bagpipes!
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I think you meant “coal an iron ore”.
Australia doesn’t make iron or steel anymore.
We send it away for processing because all of our workforce are university educated and cant get their hands dirty.
🙂
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So, the greater proportion of the population are still at the following- “ solar panels and wind turbines are great because they’re really cool technology and after all the sun and wind are free”. In other words, total denial and as long as the light goes on when they turn the switch everything is hunky dory. Bigger energy bills , maybe, but not yet totally prohibitive. What gets me are the energy company management , the electrical engineers etc who know that intermittent thin energy is never going to replace hydrocarbon sourced thick energy. Not in a month of Sundays. So, are they just hanging out for an ever increasing subsidy income or is it all a ruse to just increase energy prices per se? Either way, we’re being screwed and once we had burecrats and politicians who may have guarded against such an outcome. But, they all appear to be deluded and happy to get climate alarmism votes.
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See: Darrieus wind turbine on Wikipedia.
One of these was put up just west of Ellensburg, Washington State about 40 years ago. Backers and the company disappeared, but the machine remains. About 10 years ago, the City of Ellensburg erected – using other people’s money – 5 small towers with experimental blade-shapes. The famous Kittitas Valley wind promptly blew on of the 5 over. The remaining 4 were quickly taken down.
Like many (most, all ?) green schemes, there are small episodes of this sort that no one has bothered to keep a tally.
Siemens, being a very large and important company, with very large towers and turbines is being noticed. Failure will be a good thing.
This is somewhat like shining lights on cockroaches.
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Related humour:
https://cdn.creators.com/209/359008/359008_image.jpg
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The insurers are also getting cold feet.
https://www.reinsurancene.ws/offshore-wind-turbine-scaling-is-creating-unsustainable-market-risks-gcube/
GCube is the largest provider of insurance to renewable energy schemes.
re turbines they state :
“8MW+ machines suffer component failures within the first two years of operation, while 55% of all turbine claims now come from 8MW+ component failures during construction.”
The link is an interesting read.
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Perhaps what we’re starting to see is a break-down of the herd mentality. Normally few people are prepared to buck the consensus opinion even tho’ they know it to be a bit faulty. As soon as one person stands up and publicly points out a major problem, the herd has the courage to bleat their concern too and before you know it we have a society objecting to something. Perhaps British grandchildren will sing songs, not about “… those dark Satanic Mills” but about “those Ghostly White scare-crows”.
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Biggification of everything seems to be the go in 2023, from tv sets to windmills to utes.
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“By August Siemens Energy announced a jaw dropping annual loss of €4.5 billion.”
Ford losing $62,000 on every EV, just music to my ears.
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The only way wind power could help is that if we can create something that uses the wind but has no moving parts . The current strategy is coming undone and it was inevitable . Lets face it we have known for years that this wasn’t going to work . Perhaps we can finally start making and operating some nuclear reactors before the dark ages return .
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More good news can be found at Blackout News in Germany – you need a translator. It makes amusing reading – well if you are not German – as to the best way to destroy a world leading manufacturing economy. Specifically on windmills, GE Wind Energy are having problems with blades breaking at a windfarm in Niedersachsen. As they wisely think large bits of blades flying around is dangerous, the whole lot have been shutdown while they look for the cause of the failures.
In other good news they report another battery car maker WM in financial trouble as well as the makers of battery bicycles. Michelin are looking to join the exodus from Germany. When your country is driving people towards poverty, a great idea is to increase truck tolls so that everything is made more expensive. The Saarland is being hammered on two fronts as steelmaking is in trouble and massive gearbox manufacturer ZF is looking to close production – together they provide 21,000 jobs. Putting a Green idiot like Habeck in charge of the economy is turning into the predictable disaster.
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The irony is “ How green is your windmill? I am curious if any reader has assessed whole of life emissions of a wind farm compared to coal fired or nuclear energy capacity. When VW did a whole of life comparison of its EV golf with its EV diesel and over the 200000 km life based on the current US or German grid the diesel car created less emissions.
I suspect that when one takes into account all the emissions in the production of wind turbines in China and all the concrete , the lack of energy density and the relatively short life span ( say 20 years compared to 60+ years) the lifetime emissions of wind turbines would at best be marginal and more likely exceed a coal fired power station.
Then if one made the comparison with nuclear the contest wouldn’t be close.
Then if one adds in the emissions to get rid of dead wind turbines at the end of life of the turbines the emissions deficit will get worse.
EVs , wind turbines, solar panels are a scam not just from a cost and reliability viewpoint but also from an emissions point of view.
I’m always fascinated how countries think that if they export their emissions to China that this will lower the world’s emissions. The reality is that it won’t , and countries like Australia that do this will just destroy all manufacturing capability ( as well as the economy generally)
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Projects continue, but using better and cheaper turbine units shipped from asia
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Weak as …
Try harder, that was a token effort. Address the engineering issues.
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No sign of Gee Aye, Peter Fitz or Simon. Are they still waiting for the talking points?
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They keep talking with no point.
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That’s the point.
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Why would I comment on something I have no interest in?
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Wind turbines have uses. The Out Hebrides are exceptionally windy and the sparce population relied upon diesel generators until about 1990. In his retirement my father designed (for zero charge) a pump-storage scheme in Loch Langabhat to be coupled with wind-turbines which he also designed. He sent the design package to the electricity board who seemed dis-interested. It was too expensive to bother with and they laid a big power-cord to the mainland instead. It was much later that they built many wind turbines in the Hebrides but with the intention of shipping the power back to Glasgow.
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I had a discussion with Susan Leah at the Henty Field Days about the insanity of fighting climate change and net zero.
She continually insisted that they would never win an election again if they didn’t have a policy to get to net zero.
Things got a little heated and didn’t improve much when I changed the subject onto why Turnbull hadn’t been expelled for the Liberals.
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Isnt the point that all these so called “windfarms” are not really about generating electricity – given that the subsidy is currently at half a million a year per wind turbine – they dont have to do anything – just harvest the subsidies!
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they might be starting to notice
https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/money/300998655/the-kiwisaver-fund-that-lost-almost-30-in-a-year
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